Turning Cracks into Landscapes: Rupture to revolution in Latin America
This is an invitation to a conversation. A conversation of day to day revolution. A conversation on how we can make that day to day revolution last. How can we bring about the moments where history breaks open, where our imaginaries are freed and we are able to envision new landscapes towards new horizons? Movements and communities around the world are doing this, creating revolutions in and of the everyday. This piece is a brief look at two such movements, the Zapatistas in Chiapas and some of the autonomous movements in Argentina. These movements and communities are prefiguring the world they desire along the walk towards a desired world. They are creating forms of horizontal decision making, autogestion grounded in politica afectiva, autonomous from State and institutional power, and as a part of the walk, are creating new people and new subjectivities. These are not small “experiments,” but rather are communities that include hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Hundreds of thousands of people who have opened cracks in history and are creating something new and beautiful in the opening. These new social relationships have existed sometimes for years, enough time to have children born of the new experience who speak as new people. So the question for us, the one I invite us to discuss most seriously, is how do we listen and learn together, how do we question so that we are not only inspired, but we can learn to win. How do we find ways to hear the various experiences of the companeros, and make sense of it in our localities? The focus of this essay is on ruptures, imposed and invented, from which new creations are taking place. The intention is to find ways we can create breaks from capitalism and simultaneously open spaces of day to day revolutions.
Breaking to Open
Families sat at home, many watching television, as usual, on that hot December night that began as so many others, what to make for dinner, was it too hot to cook, would the humidity ever end, would the buses be delayed again tomorrow morning, was there a movie on channel 11 later … Then a TV newscaster appeared and announced that all bank accounts were frozen. Punto. If you had any money in the bank, sorry, there was no more information at the moment … Silence in the house. Middle and working class people sat in their homes in silence … Then it was heard … what was that sound … outside one window and then another… one balcony and another … neighborhood by neighborhood …
tac!, tac tac! …
People looked out their windows, climbed out onto their balconies and even saw it on TV … what they saw was a sound. It was their neighbors, banging spoons on pots, spatulas on pans … it was the sound of the cacerolazo. The neighborhood was out in slippers, flip flops, robes, shorts and tank tops, children on their father’s shoulders, grandmothers with canes, entire families, out in the streets. Tac!, tac tac!, tac tac tac! … cacerolando. Bodies were speaking, and speaking together. Tac! tac tac!, cacerolando …
Hundreds of thousands joined the cacerolazo on the 19th and 20th of December 2001 in Argentina. Within days two governments fled, with Cavallo, the Minister of Economy, being the first to run. The institutions of power did not know what to do. On the 20th the State of Siege was declared, reverting to well established patters of State power and “law and order.” But the people broke with the past, with what had always been done. They no longer stayed at home in fear. They came into the streets with even more bodies and sounds. And then the sound of the cacerolazo found a voice, a song. It was a shout of rejection, and a song of affirmation. Que se Vayan Todos! (They All Must Go!) was sung, and sung together with one’s neighbor. It was not just a shout against what was, but it was a song of affirmation, sung together, by the thousands and hundreds of thousands. Ohhh Que se Vayan Todos, que no quede ni uno solo (they all must go, and not even one should remain). People sang, banged pots, and greeted one another, kissing the cheeks of neighbors. People were seeing one another for the first time, remembering the names of the children and kissing the abuelas. It was a rupture with the past. It was a rupture with obedience. It was a rupture with not being together. It was the beginning of finding one another, oneself, and of meeting again. The 19th and 20th was a crack that opened vast political landscapes. It is upon these landscapes that revolutions were and are created. Revolutions of every day life.
One No, Many Yesses
The 19th and 20th is how many in the movements refer both to the moment and process of what did and continues in various ways to take place in Argentina. They are the days when people’s imaginaries broke, shattering into a million free pieces. To speak of the 19th and 20th is to speak of the social creation and all that it implies breaking from, it is not to speak of a fixed time or calendar date. “Ya Basta!” (Enough!) was shouted on that now infamous day of January 1st 1994 when the Zapatistas appeared to the world and took over 7 cities, declaring they would not disappear. They rejected 500 years of domination, declaring “Ya Basta!” to the world. They not only shouted “Ya Basta!” they simultaneously took over 7 towns, hundreds of thousands hectares of land and city hall, destroying property titles to the land in the region. They took back their land as they shouted no. “One no and many yeses” is one of the ways the Zapatistas speak of this break and opening. “Ya Basta!” “Que se Vayan Todos!” and the 19th and 20th are a few of the Nos, from which have emerged millions of yeses, the shouts and songs that have resonated around the world. The no that creates the yeses and the yeses that contain the no. These yeses are the every day changes in social relationships. The daily experiences of dignity and revolution, from self managed food, health care, education and land to autonomous forms of self government and horizontal decision making.
Variations on a Landscape, forged from a break
Throughout Latin America, over the past fifteen years, millions of people have been breaking with past ways of organizing themselves and their communities in relationship to institutional power and forms of hierarchy. Decisions are being made in the hands of people self organized in their communities, and is being done so collectively and democratically. New and various forms of democracy are being created as people organize. In Argentina this is called horizontalidad, in Chiapas, Mexico, Caracoles and “good government councils”, in Oaxaca, Mexico, APPO, a people’s assembly, in the regions around Cochabamba, Bolivia, Regantes, the autonomous communities, and in the highlands of La Paz, El Alto, neighborhood councils. Each of these examples of horizontal forms of decision making comes from a break with previous forms of organizing. This is not to argue that they are entirely new, and in fact in many of these cases the “new” forms of directly democratic decision making are part of reviving segments of old practices, whether “usos y custumbres”, as with some indigenous communities, or forms of council decision making linked to older anarchist traditions in the more urban areas. These new forms of self-organization, autogestion and social relationships that emerge from the new experiences are the focus of this essay, and in particular the ruptures that help facilitate their creation.
From the new democratic processes people speak of new relationships that are formed with one another, and the creation of new selves, new collective selves, new subjects, protagonists, and social subjects. This is a part of the break from past ways of being, both as individuals and communities. It is a break from relationships of domination and oppression. It is a break with silence, a break from the State and a breaking with the silence that existed for so long with one another. It is a break with alienation.
It is a breaking with capitalist modes of production and value production. People, in the tens of thousands, are taking over workplaces and running them in common, they are taking over land to grow crops to feed their communities by the hundreds of thousands, they are creating alternative forms of education and health care. In some places the barter networks created have involved millions of people, battering services as well as goods, for example a child psychologist working with one families child in exchange for computer repair, and another exchanging French lessons for electrical work. This production of alternative ways of surviving, outside capitalist relations, comes together with alternative forms of being with one another and creates new people. This is a new value relationship, new value practices, and a rejection of the capitalist mode, whether said explicitly or not.
The break is also with how to think about and organize for change. Linked with horizontalidad, autonomy, autogestion and the desire for the creation of new people and subjectivities, there is a break with Political Parties telling people what to do and how. This is not just a break with parties from the formal institutions of power, but also with radical and revolutionary left political parties. People are breaking with the concept of power as a thing, a thing to take or to build for, and are rejecting that vision within the radical left and their various formations. Instead people are creating a power with, a power to, potencia , power as a verb .
Bringing on the Break
Rupture can come from many places. Sometimes it comes upon us, surprisingly or seemingly surprisingly, as is the case with the economic crisis in Argentina or the Water Wars in Cochabamba. Sometimes we create the rupture, as with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico or the unions and councils in El Alto Bolivia, fighting to nationalize their gas and doing so with autonomous councils and communities.
Outside
Rupture can be a break that occurs because of outside circumstances, circumstances that is, that are not of our creation, even if their ramifications could have been within our prevention. Things like earthquakes, floods, fires or economic collapse. These ruptures often inspire thousands, even hundreds of thousands to come together and help one another. When massive collapse happens, often those formal institutions of power also collapse, or go into crisis. People then look to one another, begin to try and find solutions together, and often do so in such ways that are more “effective” and definitely more empowering, “affective,” then had it been done elsewhere or by others. When left alone, when left with one another, people turn to one another and use forms of mutual aid and support. The wake of the break is a beautiful opening of possibility. It is a crack in history. This is what was seen in Argentina. The crisis caused the break, the rupture, and people filled the streets and with one another made the new social creation. A new landscape was created from the small opening, a day to day revolution.
These ruptures and cracks happen. How do we prepare? How do we open the crack into a horizontal landscape with liberatory relationships and new values? How do we create the rupture, and do so in a prefigurative way, not just in words but in the creation of new social relationships? Many in our global movements are doing just this. Through listening to their experiences we can not only be inspired as to what is possible, we can imagine what is possible where we are, in ways that make sense to our circumstances, histories and memories. From what are we breaking and how?
